Every problem with the current iteration of healers.

[Connor]

Well, I think the main issue is that they won’t give healers anything to do during downtime other than DPS, which, is never really going to be ‘fun’ because healers can’t have full DPS rotations because of balance. And with healing oGCDs being ridiculously overpowered, you have basically no uptime required on gcd healing spells. Which means more downtime, and SE is just like ‘lol just DPS harder’.

I love healing, but it feels like chasing dragons. You get that one party where everyone is like asleep or something. You’re having to cast Raises, keep the party healed, use both GCD and oGCDs and be strategic with positioning, how you use your spells, what you’re weaving and what you’re weaving with, maximising uptime on DoTs, look for opportunities to use filler attack spells. But then you try the fight again and everyone has better gear this time. They don’t die anymore, and their shiney new gear makes their HP and defense much higher, so they can survive attacks with less healing/mitigation that before. You’re no longer using any GCDs on healing, and it becomes gradually replaced by DPS spells.

If you ask me, but I don’t think there’s any point in the healing role existing if they just make us DPS in a green skin, which isn’t far off what we are now, just with extremely simplistic rotations. I’d much rather see healers get support options to use during downtime. Best provisional idea i have as an example would be adding the spells into the role skills like ‘Bravery’, ‘Haste’, ‘Protect (PvP version)’. Give them standard gcd cast time, 400 MP cost and like 30 second duration. And I’m not saying that having a ‘DPS healer’ job would be wrong somehow, because they should cater to every playstyle, but right now there’s only one that’s acceptable because of the game’s design, and it’s the DPS healer playstyle. I don’t think that kind of playstyle should be a baseline for healers; they should have the healing kits as the baseline then split off into DPS / support / mitigation / etc, rather than having the one kind for all of them.

I guess what I mean is, the DPS kits for healers are just basic direct damage and damage over time, and I think it’d make healers much more fun if there was some sort of interaction with the healing kits. I mean, if they want the DPS healer playstyle as the baseline surely we should have more interesting attack spells that have some interaction with our healing kits, like if Malefic IV inflicted Slow or Glare inflicted Blind (not very worthwhile status effects but just examples to try and make what I mean make sense lol)

Basically my issue is that we have nothing to do during the huge amounts of healer downtime we get but SE just tries to cover it up by slapping DPS spells on healers, reducing and then homogenising the spells instead of making the healing mechanics fun and engaging or allowing healers to contribute in a meaningful way outside of DPS spam. Or maybe a better way to say it would be, my issue with healers is that the whole DPS thing is just a cover up developers are using for how easy and weirdly uninvolved healing. And it’s compounded by the fact that if you’d prefer a different healer playstyle, you don’t have any real options without becoming a huge detriment to your party

Tl;dr: my issue with healers is that they aren’t giving us enough interesting abilities beyond ‘small heal, big heal, filler attack, DoT, etc’